To me, the biggest surprise is that this alert system actually worked. Whenever I set up sensing / monitoring systems for my web services, I often wonder if it really will work.
The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
201–210 of 375 posts
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#202It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from…
Yeah. I spent all of 1.5 months in a government contracting shop. I quit as fast as possible. Until something changes with project management and politics, that's just a space that is unlikely to produce good software.
If you have good software, you can more safely use the software without a full-time developer to do maintenance on it.
I have worked in shops that intentionally deliver bad software, and those that had higher ethical standards, and the only difference on the business side was that the bad software had higher budgets and more permanent employees (both more-permanent employees and more permanent-employees).
The problem is that all the people who can tell the difference between good and bad are employed by the contractors. The direct government employees are still counting SLoC and basing their UI requirements on the Excel spreadsheets that were directly copied from paper forms from the 1970s. I am not making this up.
The contract awards are still mostly based on who you know, rather than the quality of your past work, so given the choice between a slipshod initial implementation with a juicy back end in the form of continual maintenance and doing it right the first time and delivering something that never needs contractor support ever again, it isn't surprising that a lot of companies opt for the former even when most of their employees would prefer the latter.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#203It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from…
It looks like quite a normal UI from an "internal" government or enterprise application point of view. In this case, the citizens of Hawaii paid for the bad system design with 48 minutes of existential horror. But these kinds of mistakes happens ALL THE TIME with "enterprise applications." Oracle has similar horrendous UX for their EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), so does SAP, Siemens, etc. People regularly make cost…
> People regularly make costly mistakes in shipping and receiving, purchasing and manufacturing because they have to deal with shitty confusing applications that look just like that screenshot.
Currently unscrewing one of those as my day job.
"Delete all production orders for period" - no confirmation, no ability to rollback (beyond me restoring from a backup) that kind of thing.
It's not that it isn't user friendly, it's that it is actively user hostile.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a forward thinking developer saying "hey should we at least have colored buttons Accessibility becomes an issue for colourblind people then.
Government standards never allow only color distinction. There always must be an additional factor than just color. For instance, here's some icons from NATO, which used to be MIL-STD-2525. You'll notice that all the icons differentiate in both color and form. The NTDS standards for Naval systems are similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Joint_Military_Symbology#...
Hadn't seen this, it's brilliant.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#205https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-opposite-of-fitts-law/ In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot's seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat, out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible. Applications must have ejector seat…
There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc. However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?
> crew relationship management
At least with airlines this seems to be largely abandoned now. My wife worked for a large middle eastern airline for a few years, and the crews were just assigned randomly. Well I guess there is a complicated algorithm that figures it out, but given the company has nearly 15,000 cabin crew it’s unlikely you’ll see someone you flew with again on another flight.
Also from the stories I heard people were promoted to managerial roles (on big flights there’s usually a senior for each class, and then a purser who reports to the captain) through seniority, not because they had any specific people skills that made them a good manager.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#206https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-opposite-of-fitts-law/ In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot's seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat, out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible. Applications must have ejector seat…
To underline this, here's what happens when something goes wrong with an ejector seat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-37475298 We probably won't ever know how many people died as a direct result of the Hawaii BMD mis-alert, but I'd be surprised if the number was non-zero (think in terms of car crashes, stress-aggravated cerebrovascular accidents, and so on). Similarly, consider the warning signage…
That guy's death was apparently complicated by a chain of failures: user error with the safety pin, user error with the firing handle, maintenance/construction error with some bolt, and several aspects of the M/B design that allowed all failures to happen at once. Overall, those seats have saved some 7500 pilots (search for the tie club) and maybe killed a few: similar odds and debate to airbag deployments.
ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sean_Cunningham_(pilo...
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#207It's easy to see how this is bad, and I bet dozens of designers are now creating alternatives for their dribble and Twitter appreciation, but the problem is probably what led to this, not this specifically. I can see it: a contractor started with a link that triggers a push notification, then someone requested another link, then another, then it grew from there, never having the ability to stop and rethink this from…
It looks like quite a normal UI from an "internal" government or enterprise application point of view. In this case, the citizens of Hawaii paid for the bad system design with 48 minutes of existential horror. But these kinds of mistakes happens ALL THE TIME with "enterprise applications." Oracle has similar horrendous UX for their EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), so does SAP, Siemens, etc. People regularly make cost…
Enterprise software is chosen by a manager who is told the feature list, but never uses the software. Usability is never considered because the manager never uses the software, and it's not really possible to evaluate usability on paper (they may say "this is really usable" and an application can still be really bad; if they say "it has feature X" and doesn't then you can sue them for breach of contract).
Consumer software is chosen by people that actually use the software. They can see that it is shit, give it bad reviews etc.
I used to work at a very large company who use Teamcity (think git for CAD), which was the worst POS I have ever used. A 90s Java mess that was so slow you could watch it redrawing GUI controls in slow motion. Everybody that used it hated it. At least some of the higher ups liked it, but they didn't actually have to use it.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#208For those of you who don't believe a single thing we're being told about this situation -- including this screenshot -- just know that you're not alone. You don't need to question the narrative publicly like some of us do, but it's always good to keep an open mind about everything we're told, and sadly, that means considering the possibility that there have been more lies than truths told since Saturday. Hopefully so…
This isn't the first time a scary EBS message was mistakenly sent out (there was a famous incident in 1971), and it probably won't be the last time. I see no reason to doubt that it was a UX failure.
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incremental design doesn’t excuse the guy adding thing #2 or thing #3 not paying attention to the whole. Nor does being a contractor excuse it. You don’t get a contract job to add some links to a page. You are contracted to modify it (regardless of what the buyer said he wanted) - and you are responsible for not making it dangerous. Even if that means you can’t take the job. Someone reviewed the spec for this. Someon…
> You are contracted to modify it (regardless of what the buyer said he wanted) - and you are responsible for not making it dangerous. Actually, with government contracts, you are legally obligated to perform only the task assigned. Providing work to the government without the government paying for it is illegal . And you are only being paid for what's in the contract. (This is actually overall a good thing. Otherwis…
This might be the case, but I sure wouldn’t have done it this way regardless. I would have pressed on to get the customer to revise the order, or just fixed it (criminal or not), or refused the job.
This is clearly a case where all the downsides of bureaucracy were in full effect (someone might be afraid to touch something) but not the benefits (lots of security checks and balances such as in air traffic control).
Re: The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
#210More importantly - what about the reverse case? Presumably someone issuing a real ballistic missile warning is doing so while terrified and in a hurry. The consequences of pressing the "This is a drill" button in that case are a lot worse than this.
Actually from some of the interviews with Hawaiians on NPR, it seemed like people didn't know what to do when waiting for an incoming ballistic missile. So it seems like even in the case where there is a real threat, the usefulness of the message is questionable if people aren't trained about what to do when waiting for a missile.